One by one, the GOP's talking points about President Obama's management of the American economy have fallen by the wayside. Even before he first took the oath of office on January 20, 2009, Republicans were warning about the "Obama Bear Market." Instead, the Dow Jones has more than doubled in value in hitting record highs. Contrary to bogus Republicans claims that the Obama stimulus program "did not create a single job" and "made the economy worse," the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and most other observers concluded his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) boosted GDP, added millions of jobs and prevented "Great Depression 2.0." And with last week's strong jobs report, the final GOP sound bite--that under President Bush "added jobs for a record 52 straight months"--has now been tossed into the rhetorical dustbin of history.
With word that the U.S. economy added a robust 288,000 jobs in June, the Obama White House noted that the private sector has added 9.7 million jobs over 52 straight months of job growth. If that 52 number sounds familiar, it should.

The "52 straight months" was a highlight of President Bush's 2008 State of the Union address and has been faithfully regurgitated by Republicans ever since. Even as late as the 2012 presidential campaign, former RNC chairman and current Virginia GOP Senate candidate Ed Gillespie was using to make the case for returning a Republican to the White House:

"There were 52 months of uninterrupted job creation under President Bush as a result of those tax cuts. That's the longest actually in American history. The longest period of uninterrupted job creation."

But as Politifact reported when Gillespie previously deployed the sound bite during the 2010 midterm campaign, the real number was 46 months. Much more damaging was this conclusion:

We might add that over the course of Bush's presidency -- a total of 96 months -- the economy created 1.08 million jobs. That may sound like a lot, but compared to every other post-World War II president prior to Obama, it's the lowest average annual percentage increase in jobs created.

And as Michael Tomasky documented after last week's strong employment numbers ("Why You Don't Know Obama Has Created 4.5 Million Jobs"), President Obama blew past Bush a long time ago. Even giving all of January 2009 to Obama (a month when the U.S. economy shed a staggering 820,000 jobs, Bush's performance was "pathetic" in comparison:

But they've added up, because under Obama, the economy has added 9.425 million jobs and lost 4.887, for a net gain of 4.538 million jobs. That's a 3 million advantage over Bush.

And that figure actually overstates George W. Bush's job creation record. Calculated Risk showed that under President Bush the American private sector lost 462,000 jobs. That contraction was only offset by the 1.7 million public sector jobs added by federal, state and local governments during Dubya's eight-year tenure. So much for the January 2009 declaration of then-RNC chairman Michael Steele, "You and I know that in the history of mankind and womankind, government -- federal, state, local, or otherwise -- has never created one job."

The inconvenient truth that the government employment at levels has shrunk under President Obama is the final irony in the conservative efforts to talk down the economic recovery. As Time explained, the unprecedented contraction of the public sector during the slow recovery from the Bush recession is precisely "Why the Good Jobs Report Isn't Even Better." The draconian austerity programs and layoffs of workers at the state and local level constituted an "anti-stimulus" that by 2013 cost the American economy as many as 2.2 million jobs overall. As the Economic Policy Institute summed it up last week:

One thing that has been historically unique about this recovery is the unprecedented loss of public sector jobs. The private sector began adding jobs in the spring of 2010, but the public sector continued shedding jobs until last summer. The figure below shows the public sector jobs gap. We are currently 716,000 public sector jobs below where we were when the recovery started, but to keep up with population growth since then, we should have added over 800,000 jobs, so we are around 1.5 million public sector jobs down. About a third of them are teachers and other employees in public K-12 education.

Again, if not for the expansion of government employment during his two terms, President Bush not only would not have had his "52 straight months of job growth." He wouldn't have had job growth at all. As for President Obama and his 52 consecutive months of private sector job creation, with an unemployment rate at 6.1 percent and lagging workforce participation even he admits there is a lot more work to do. Still, Obama is just the latest president from his party to prove this time-tested talking point: the U.S. economy almost always does better when a Democrat is in the White House.